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How Grey Poupon is Generating Leads, Collecting Customer Data

You may have seen some recent buzz about Grey Poupon's Society of Good Taste, a club you can apply to join on Facebook (yes, people do get rejected). I thought this was a little mysterious, so I started talking some friends into applying with me to see what happened.

Image: GreyPoupon,com
If you go on over to Grey Poupon's Facebook page, there's an app you can click on to apply, and then Grey Poupon will use a Wolfram-Alpha-like app to assess your Facebook presence.

Grey Poupon will look at how many friends you have, how many photos in which you've been tagged, how many schools/employers you have listed on your page, how many other brands you like, and your listed interests (in bands, hobbies, movies, etc.). It will then give you a score and let you know if you've made it into the Society.

If you have, then you'll be extended a special offer. Right now, in exchange for more information - your name, street address, and email, you're promised a free tote bag. Then, you're encouraged to invite friends to apply to the Society for Good Taste.

I am floored by the amount of data Grey Poupon is able to collect for marketing purposes here. The data-head in me is feeling hungry, and not for fine-grained mustard.

Grey Poupon (a Kraft brand) can now crunch age, sex, school, employer, location, hobby, and interest data for its fans, and see their photos and other content. It can also use the address data it collects to purchase income, net worth, and other household financial data for its Society members.

Also important, it does reject people from the Society: Those who don't have lots of Facebook friends, aren't tagged in a lot of photos, or don't have a long list of brands, movies, and music they like listed on their pages. This means that Grey Poupon is building a community of Facebook influencers whose power they'll be wielding on behalf of their brand.

I think this is brilliant strategy, and it's interesting to see thousands of people willingly give a brand so much information about themselves in return for a totebag. As a lead generation program, this is brilliant and inspiring.

What do you think? Please share.

PS - I'll be blogging here on and off, but I'm still working on Tito's Greenhouse. The garden is coming along...

PPS - If you go to GreyPoupon.com, the brand's Pinterest page comes up. What do you think of that? It's the first time I've seen a brand do this and I'm wondering what folks think. Is this something you'd try?